French News Agency Sues ex-Twitter For Not Paying Snippet Tax
The lawsuits against Elon Musk's ex-Twitter continue to pile up, but here's one where the law itself is ridiculous and unjust. As you'll recall, the EU Copyright Directive included a link or snippet tax for news (which they call a neighboring right") similar to the link taxes we've discussed in Australia and Canada. The main difference here was that the tax" was for including snippets (the short summaries or clips) of news. Of course, since the EU's was a directive, it was left to the member countries to implement their own version, which has mostly been a mess.
It's not at all surprising that France rushed out of the gate with its implementation of it, though it's had mixed results. Given France's lack of a fair use" as a concept, it seemed to have no issue with demanding taxes from social media companies for sending traffic to news publishers. Google (the main target of the snippet tax) basically told French publishers that rather than pay, it would simply stop posting snippets from news stories, unless news publishers opted in" to reenable snippets, effectively creating a system in which news publishers would admit that they needed Google sending them traffic more than they were angry at Google for stealing" from them.
The French publishers were... less than pleased with this, and after Google was fined 500 million for failing to negotiate in good faith" (a pretty ridiculous bit of nonsense), the company eventually agreed to pay some pocket change ($76 million over 3 years split between over 150 publications, which was obviously significantly less than the fines they would have racked up otherwise).
Anyway, the law is ridiculous and a sham. And while French regulators were able to force Google (and Meta) to pay up eventually, now Agence France-Presse, more commonly known as AFP, has decided to sue exTwitter directly for failing to negotiate.
AFP has accused X, owned by billionaire tycoon Elon Musk, of a clear refusal" to engage in discussions on neighboring rights.
AFP said in a statement it had lodged a case with a judge in Paris to force the platform to hand over data that would allow the French news agency to estimate a fair level of compensation.
I'm curious about the details here, because ex-Twitter doesn't just grab snippets like, say, a Google news does. It is true that if you post a link to an article it can show a card" but... as far as I know, the news website themselves have to set that up. So, to the extent that there are snippets of news stories from AFP on ex-Twitter, it's because AFP enabled ex-Twitter's social cards.
As for Elon's clear refusal" to negotiate, I mean, sure? He's ignoring lots of other obligations that are actually serious, so why wouldn't he ignore this. Frankly, he should be ignoring this, or fighting back against this nonsense (my guess is that there's no one left at ex-Twitter who even understands the issue, and that's why it got ignored).
Either way, going to court over this is pretty silly by AFP (though AFP has a history of filing very silly law suits like this. Back in 2005, they literally sued Google for linking to their stories, despite the lack of any such neighboring right. And, AFP has been a leading advocate for neighboring rights (I mean, it profits from them, so why not?) including that the EU Parliament literally paid off AFP to create pro-Copyright Directive propaganda videos.
So, basically, this whole situation seems like a mess. If ex-Twitter still had a legal and policy strategy, it might have handled this more properly, and prepared a real challenge to the nonsense of France's laws. Or, done something like blocking news links in France. But, either way, this is a very stupid law being abused by a corrupt, greedy, news organization, filing a very silly lawsuit that, as far as I can tell, is saying that Twitter has to pay AFP for the snippets on link cards that AFP itself enabled.